Ethics in Conflict

Sometimes being a manager means having to deal with conflicting directives, whether that means orders from different superiors that contradict each other, or when your instructions are impossible under the budget, the company’s operating policies, the laws of the city, county, state or country, or in worst-case scenarios, the laws of physics. People have told me about supervisors who were unable to understand that a bank deposit can not be made on a bank holiday, and I once had a boss give me an assignment and order me to complete it by a deadline that had already passed. But sometimes it is our very responsibilities as managers that come into conflict.

Take, for example, the case of a large retail firm I used to work for. Our company’s policies stated that if anyone running a cash register – anyone, from a part-time seasonal temp hired yesterday to a store manager with 30 years on the job – was off by more than ¼ of 1 percent on their cash drawer at the end of a shift they received a written reprimand; three of these in your permanent record and you were fired. Even one would prevent your being promoted or even getting a raise for years to come. Keep in mind that this equates to 25 cents on every $100 of transactions. Unfortunately, almost no one can meet that standard on a consistent basis; certainly not in a high-volume general merchandise store during a busy time of the year.

If I’d obeyed that rule, I’d have been writing someone up every shift – and firing someone every week. There is no way our store could have kept up with hiring and training new personnel to replace those being fired; within a month or two we’d have been unable to operate at all. Which would, I imagine, have resulted in every member of our management team being fired. If every manager in every store in the chain had done this, the entire company would have been bankrupt in less than a year. What a lot of us did was fudge the system just enough; if someone was 26 cents off at the end of a shift when they could only be off by 25 and keep their job, I’d add a penny out of my own pocket to their total before I counted it into the safe. Cost me a penny, saved the company the cost of firing, recruiting, hiring and training a replacement (anywhere from $200 to $2,000 at the time, depending on a number of variables).

Now here’s the point: Clearly, I had a responsibility to the company to maintain discipline and enforce their internal regulations. But as a manager, I also had a responsibility to run my unit efficiently, bring in the highest possible gross and net profit, and provide the most value to our shareholders. One could certainly argue that I had a responsibility not to let the company be utterly destroyed by unrealistic, arbitrary (and stupid) performance standards written by people who had not the first clue as to what working conditions were like in the field. And I felt that I had a duty to my people; that it was my responsibility to reward their loyalty as much as to punish them for their infractions. I do not intend to lecture anyone on the subject of justice, but firing someone for a penny’s infraction did not seem just to me. It still doesn’t.

What makes this issue so complicated is that it is, without question, a slippery slope argument. Covering for an employee who misplaced a penny (or even 26 of them) won’t matter very much in the scheme of things, although as a manager it is also my responsibility to teach my people to carefully count back change so as to avoid the problem. But on the other side of the issue, if one of my employees is committing a series of major felonies (drug dealing, child molesting, torture and criminal conspiracy) there is no excuse for me or my company to cover up such crimes, even if sports leagues, major religions or Federal agencies do exactly the same thing every day. Where do we draw the line, and who gets to draw it? Can we take even the first step onto that slope and not effectively condone the worst crimes at its bottom? By the same token, if we blindly follow the rules and destroy the company, put thousands of people out of work, and bankrupt at least some of our shareholders, have we really fulfilled our obligations to our employers?

Of course, the simple answer would be to just enforce every rule, punish every violator to the fullest extent, and quit any position where you are not comfortable doing so. But there won’t be a lot of drug stores still operating if everybody does that…